WEBVTT 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:18.000 In the hating of publishing, editors from dozens of thriving publishing houses mingled with literary giants over jazz tunes or discussed art with cultural icons all while shaping the literary landscape. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:27.000 Fast forward to today. There are 5 major publishing houses built by endless mergers and acquisitions and everyone's chasing the next major blockbuster. 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:33.000 It all leaves us to ask the question. What has conglomeration actually done to the publishing industry? 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:39.000 And most importantly, to books. Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland. I'm a librarian at the Internet Archive. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:53.000 I want to welcome you to today's book talk in big fiction. Author and Emery University professor Dan Sineken explores how changes in the publishing publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. 00:00:53.000 --> 00:01:02.000 Joining Dan for today's conversation will be Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-champaign. 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:03.000 As we start up here, I'd like to make sure that you have grabbed your copy of Big Fiction. 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:12.000 I have mine in print. This is a fantastic book. It's a great read, really engaging. 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:25.000 It's a great history. So I would recommend that you that you grab a copy today and so Duncan who is working behind the scenes here today with Caitlin, thank you both, sharing the link out in chat and we'll be doing that throughout today's conversation. 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:34.000 With that link you can purchase the book new from the book Smith which is our San Francisco local bookstore and the historic Kate Ashbury neighborhood or of course from your own preferred bookshop. 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:35.000 Before we dive in, let's take care of some, logistics. Please say hi and the chat. 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:46.000 We'd love you to introduce yourself and let us know where you're joining in from for today's conversation. 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:53.000 Our chat is open. For today's discussion, please do keep it relevant and respectful and feel free to drop in questions for our panelists. 00:01:53.000 --> 00:02:09.000 Tomorrow, a question that always comes up. Yes, we are recording today's session and all participants will receive an email can tomorrow containing a link for the recording for today as well as the transcript of the chat. 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:12.000 So everything that we're sharing out here all the for a heads up, everything that you're putting into chat will be preserved. 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:24.000 And the, in addition to the resources that we're sharing. You'll get that, in your email tomorrow. 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:32.000 And now, as we get started here today, I'd like to welcome Brewster Kale, the Internet Archives founder and digital librarian to the screen. 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:33.000 How are you, Brewster? 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:55.000 Thank you. I appreciate this. And this is completely great. Hello from Vancouver, Canada, where we're seeing actually a lot of the small publishers crushed out of business and not having any mechanism really of participating in the digital e-book world or much less the booksellers because it's controlled by very few large platforms. 00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:04.000 Are we going to see it sort of Netflix of books where things can be blinked on and off based on licensing deals at the end of the month and then the books just go away and they're not allowed to be in any library. 00:03:04.000 --> 00:03:31.000 This is the sort of thing that we're seeing within the library world and it's and heavily impact so I'm very excited about this book and this scholarship around the effects of what happens when you have only a few large publisher platforms, controlling, what it is we read and what it is we know as a society. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:38.000 So thank you very much for for coming and speaking gear at the Internet Archive. Back to you Chris. 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:43.000 Thanks, Brewster. Now I'd like to welcome Dave Hansen to the screen. Dave is the executive director of Authors Alliance and Dave's gonna help provide a little more background for today's conversation and and kick things off. 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:52.000 Over to you Dave. 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:53.000 Hi, thank you Chris and thanks Brewster. I'm really happy to be here again today. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:04:03.000 Sponsoring, co-sponsoring, this book talk with Internet Archive. 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:10.000 And for, those of you who haven't joined our book talks before, I'd encourage you to go check out, some of the recordings. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:20.000 They're really good. We've done, really interesting set a series. And you know, I will give you a little background on the history of this one. 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:28.000 My 1st encounter. With big fiction was actually at a conference. I think it was the Association of Writing Professional. 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:43.000 And Columbia University had a table out and I saw this book. Sitting on it and I thought gee that sounds like the book for me and I started flipping through it and I didn't I really didn't put it down until I had to go eat because they were moving the food out. 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:54.000 It was way better. Then I thought it was going to be and I thought it was going to be really good. 00:04:54.000 --> 00:05:22.000 So I think we're in for a treat today. It, it really is a book that, shows a level of homework that Dan did in writing this that kind of blew me away in terms of the characters and the people and the mess and the kind of sprawling nature of the publishing industry and how we've seen that change over the last, 50, 60, 70 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:46.000 years and, and the resulting system that we have today, Brewster talked a little bit about some of the challenges that that poses for libraries and that same system poses an awful lot of challenges for authors as well who are trying to have their voice heard and trying to get in front of readers in ways that can expand their reaching impact and a consolidated publishing industry. 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:52.000 Poses some challenges for that. So I, I think it's a fantastic book. 00:05:52.000 --> 00:06:00.000 I really encourage you all to go out and buy a coffee. And, and I bet you'll not wanna put it down like me. 00:06:00.000 --> 00:06:13.000 So, so I did want to say a little bit more about authors and then I'm gonna give some introductions to, to Dan and to our moderator, Ted Underwood. 00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:21.000 So if you're not familiar with Authors Alliance, we are a nonprofit that is just about to celebrate our 10th anniversary. 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:45.000 We were formed in or launched in May of 2,014 and actually we're gonna host our 10th anniversary celebration event at the Internet Archive, the title of which is monopolies and moral panic and actually getting at some of the issues associated with having large consolidated publishing industries and platforms and things like that. 00:06:45.000 --> 00:06:46.000 So, yeah, I think we'll have a little slide at the end. Inviting you all to that. 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:52.000 If you want to learn more about authors alliance and some of the work that we do, you can find us, I think there's a link put in the chat. 00:06:52.000 --> 00:07:06.000 And you're definitely welcome to join. We welcome authors of all types. We have everybody as members from. 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:24.000 From a Nobel Prize winners to fan fiction writers to aspiring novelists. And, well, I think what really unites us together is that we are a group of authors who are interested in using our work for the public good. 00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:29.000 So that's enough about author's alliance. I'd like to make a couple of introductions. 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:38.000 1st to our moderator, Ted Underwood. So Ted Underwood is a professor in the School of Information Science. 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:49.000 Sciences and also holds an appointment with the Department of English, in the College of Liberal Arts and Science at the University of Illinois. 00:07:49.000 --> 00:07:58.000 Efforting 2 books that describe 18th and 19th century literature using familiar critical methods he turned to new opportunities created by large digital libraries. 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:01.000 And since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that have become visible across long timelines when we consider hundreds of thousands of books. 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:18.000 And he's kind of low-key famous among I think the digital humanities and text data mining crowd and so really a treat to have him here today. 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:25.000 He's authored 3 books about literary history. distant horizons published by Chicago. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:35.000 University of Chicago press, why literary periods matter, historical contrast, and the prestige of English studies by Stanford University Press. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:42.000 And the work of the Sun, literature, science and political economy, 1760 to 1860. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:47.000 So, Ted will be moderating today. and we are going to hear 1st from Dan. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:58.000 Second, assistant professor of English with a currency appointment and quantitative theory and methods from Emory University. 00:08:58.000 --> 00:09:12.000 In addition to big fiction, he's the author of American literature and the long down turn neoliberal apocalypse by Oxford University Press published in 2,020. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:20.000 And his writing has appeared all over. He's in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles review of books and elsewhere. 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:33.000 And he is also co-founder and co-editor of the post 45 data collective which peer reviews and houses post 1,945 literary and cultural data on an open access website. 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:41.000 It's really cool to be source. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Ted. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:51.000 And Dan and, we're gonna have a really good book talk. So thanks. 00:09:51.000 --> 00:10:02.000 All right, well, it is wonderful to be here. I am so grateful for the opportunity from the Internet Archive and from Authors Alliance. 00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:16.000 And grateful to Ted as well for being with interlocutor for this event. So I'm gonna begin just by saying a few words about big fiction and a few notes specific to this occasion. 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:26.000 So big fiction is a history of what I call the conglomerate era in publishing. With special attention as the title suggests to fiction. 00:10:26.000 --> 00:10:34.000 Now the publishing industry looks radically different today than it did 60 or 70 years ago. If you port it back to the 19 fiftys, you would find a collection of smallish independent publishers. 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:51.000 Back then, Random House had something like 200 employees total. Today, Penguin Random House has about 10,000 employees. 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:58.000 Now most of those publishers back in the 19 fifties were run by the founders or the errors of the founders. 00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:07.000 They were Usually family businesses. And so they were run for the most part by book people. And book people were notoriously not terribly efficient. 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:15.000 They were not the most effective business people. Beginning in the 1960. Large conglomerates started to consolidate the industry. 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:28.000 They began to acquire publishers and this the velocity of this consolidation increased in the late 19 seventys and continued onward. 00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:47.000 And subsequent decades until by the early 21st century there were just 6 the big 6 conglomerates that had consolidated something like 80% of trade, publishing that was reduced to 5 in 2,013 when Penguin and Random House. 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:57.000 Merged. What I do in big fiction is I tell the story of what all of this consolidation has meant for fiction. 00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:08.000 Now, A couple notes for this, this occasion in this audience. There was some small amount of data gathering and computational analysis that undergirds big fiction. 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:25.000 I would have done more if it had been easier to acquire and study texts under copyright prior to 2,021 when I did most of the work a project that Dave Hansen and authors alliance have been hard at work on from one particular angle and I'm grateful to them for that. 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:38.000 And as Dave was saying, my interlocutor Ted is Definitely low key famous in this world. He's arguably the leading practitioner of computational literary studies, period. 00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:50.000 Now there have been a few interesting developments in the publishing industry in just the last few years essentially since I finished writing the book and I just want to note a few things about those at the outset. 00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:59.000 The Department of Justice, the US Department of Justice, sued to block Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon and Schister on anti-trust grounds. 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:09.000 And they won that case possibly suggesting that we are reaching some sort of limit to consolidating the industry at this point. 00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:20.000 So in instead, KKR, a private equity firm, maybe most well known for bankrupting, Toys R Us came in and acquired. 00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:30.000 Simon Schister and the entrance of private equity into the publishing industry is a new development that everyone is watching. 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:57.000 But arguably the biggest development of the 21st century is the explosion of born digital fiction. A vast amount of literature is now self-published through digital platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing or is contributed to fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own or written through Whatpad, a social networking, fiction writing site with tens of millions of monthly. 00:13:57.000 --> 00:14:06.000 Users and each of these platforms KDP, our cup of our own and Wpad are different and important and substantive ways. 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:18.000 This whole universe of internet fiction exists mostly in parallel to traditional publishing and they're only at this point relatively few transmissions between. 00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:27.000 Now the last thing I'll say is just a note about AI, which is certainly on everyone's minds in publishing today for many different reasons actually. 00:14:27.000 --> 00:14:40.000 There's 1 about questions about the fair use. Of literature. As used by AI companies in the training data to train their models. 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:51.000 There's also already a lot of authors, especially in the KDP world, self-published writers already collaborating with AI to write fiction. 00:14:51.000 --> 00:15:00.000 And finally within publishing the big conglomerate publishing houses, they're looking at AI as a way to increase the efficiency and productivity of their workforce. 00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:14.000 So I'm aware that already there is a Penguin random house has PRH GPT as of recently, which I imagine they're going to be using in-house to try to speed up things like copyrighting on the covers. 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:20.000 So if you start to see some hallucinations on the covers of books from Penguin Random House, you might know. 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:33.000 The source. But okay, that's enough for me just kind of to get started. So I'm gonna I'm gonna say let's, get into it. 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:42.000 Thanks. Thanks, Dan. And congratulations on this book, which is a real pleasure to read and in lots of ways. 00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:51.000 And I'm gonna, you know, I've got several questions for you. I'm gonna start with sort of the big picture. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:59.000 Sort of if you could give us your sense. There's so many different ways of telling this story, the story of conglomeration and consolidation in publishing. 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:12.000 And when we when we even use the word conglomeration that tends to suggest an angle on it where we're looking at the producers at the publishing houses, the corporate structures that organized them. 00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:20.000 And there is one way that that story can be told where that's central. I think you start off the story by saying, well, corporations need to grow. 00:16:20.000 --> 00:16:32.000 They need to demonstrate growth. And one way they can do that is by acquiring other corporations. But there are also other ways of telling the story that are woven through this volume because it's a story with multiple facets. 00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:56.000 And for instance, one could focus on readers, you know, are they distracted by television and is that cutting into the mass market part of the part of the publishing industry or on the other hand is it just the growth of readership that you know sort of inevitably leads to gigantism in publishing or beyond publishing and reading there's the other part of it which is publicity and distribution. 00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:04.000 And at moments you talk about the rise of the book tour and the publicity campaign. As well as sort of a factor in the. 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:15.000 The new scale of publishing. So I'm not necessarily asking you to choose between these but if you know if you wanted to weave these into a story about the reason for conglomeration. 00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:18.000 How would you do that? 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:48.000 So I would, these, this is whole interlocking set of pieces. And like the big sort of upheaval, it really a lot of what we see today is a result of things that happen structurally at a number of different layers from the people who own the publishing companies to changes in how literary agents work to how distribution was revolutionized by a company called Ingram to the Rise of Chain 00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:57.000 Bookstores. And a lot of this was happening in the late 19 seventys and the 19 eightys and a lot of the impulse for it happening at that moment. 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:12.000 Is because of what was going on at a very high level economically. So the 19 fiftys and 19 sixtys were this incredible period one of the greatest periods of capitalist growth in the United States, but also then anywhere in the history of capitalism. 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:23.000 And that meant that there were all these new readers, all this this good time there was just like expansive growth happening in books then and in the 19 seventys We had, so books are starting to cost more. 00:18:23.000 --> 00:18:38.000 Wages are stagnating. People have less money to buy books, but these new conglomerates are now beholden to shareholder value and need to figure out how to institute growth. 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:44.000 And this, one way they figure out how to do that is to take advantage of something that's happening by Ingram, which makes it possible to distribute trade paperbacks and hardbacks all over the country. 00:18:44.000 --> 00:19:08.000 In a mass cultural way and those are then able to be sold at new chain bookstores that are emerging in suburban shopping malls in the form of Walden books and B Dalton and all of this creates the conditions out of which you can see changes in the kind of books that get published. 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:20.000 So for example, fantasy was not a genre in the way we standard today until it was able to take advantage of exactly all those developments that I just named. 00:19:20.000 --> 00:19:46.000 By there was a canny editor working in a new imprint called Del Ray and he saw that if you took Lord of the Rings and made a really derivative formulate versions of it, you could turn fantasy into a genre that 12 year olds like me and 1,995 would go to this shopping mall with my mom and we'd stop into Walden books and I'd see the peers and 00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:53.000 Anthony. Zan series and I'd grab them and read them. All of that, the reason, so this is a big part of why I wrote the story. 00:19:53.000 --> 00:19:58.000 I was like, why did I pull Zanth off the bookshelf in 1,995? 00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:08.000 The answer is all of these developments that we're interlocking in in really that moment from like the mid seventys to the mid eightys was kind of the major moment of people. 00:20:08.000 --> 00:20:12.000 Fascinating. Thanks. That's that. 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:19.000 Highlights what you think is the sort of the crucial transformation with lots of other things going on, but. 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:26.000 You know, so beyond the story of conglomeration, I would say in some ways, You know that that's on the title. 00:20:26.000 --> 00:20:48.000 That's on the that's on the front cover. But in some ways, this is a bigger story because it's not just the story of the conglomerates themselves, but also of other niches in the publishing industry, the nonprofits, the independents who don't go, you know, publicly owned and how their particular role in the market also shapes what they decide to do and the kind 00:20:48.000 --> 00:21:04.000 of fiction that they decide to publish. You, you could say that it's a story of conglomeration, but also at moments you hint, it's more broadly trying to get us to sort of Stop thinking just about individual authors of books and think about the sort of collective. 00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:14.000 Economic and institutional system that produces books and produces particular niches. In in the marketplace. 00:21:14.000 --> 00:21:20.000 And yet, the, here's the contradiction I want to set up for you or want to invite you to explain. 00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:21.000 I don't think I've ever read a literary history that is more focused on individuals than this one. 00:21:21.000 --> 00:21:33.000 At the same time as like, you know, in a sense it's about big institutional and economic forces. 00:21:33.000 --> 00:21:40.000 In fact, every page of this book has an individual story on it, vivid individual stories. I just looked up. 00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:46.000 You know, been at surf in the in the index and I saw, you know, been it surf. 00:21:46.000 --> 00:21:53.000 Comma, sexism, exclamation point of, and that the story is so dramatic that it really needs that exclamation point. 00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:06.000 But they're also, you know, positive stories. Just a lot of different individuals. How, why is, you know, why did you decide to tell the story so much as a story about individual people given the kind of story it is? 00:22:06.000 --> 00:22:16.000 Yes, so in my mind, you've put your finger on the great drama of big fiction, which is the drama of the individual. 00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:41.000 And the system and how these 2 are always in a sort of agonistic battle. Through publishing and you know there's 1 particular kind of individual that tends to get elevated and focused on to the exclusion of the vast majority of the others and that is the figure of the author. 00:22:41.000 --> 00:22:42.000 Hmm. 00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:45.000 So the figure of the author, we fetishize the figure of the author in this country. And there's deep historical roots, lots of reasons why we do this. 00:22:45.000 --> 00:23:03.000 We love the fantasy of the solitary author drawing from the creativity of their imagination to deliver works of genius from their minds to ours. 00:23:03.000 --> 00:23:14.000 That's often what we go to bookstores and pull bookshelves, books out the bookshelf, and to buy when we're buying the commodity of the book is that experience, that fantasy of authorship. 00:23:14.000 --> 00:23:20.000 That's why publishers emblazon the covers of their books with the name of the author, but hide the publisher and in a way that's a little harder to find. 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:35.000 But the problem with this vision is that if you start to pay attention to how books are made, you start to see a very different picture. 00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:42.000 And now I'm hardly the 1st person to burst this bubble. I mean, I think you and I, Ted share something like a structuralist or even post-structuralist conception of ideation and authorship, how cognition works. 00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:54.000 But I'm coming at it from a very like specific angle of the nitty-gritty. 00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:21.000 Of publishing and and so I posit something in this book that I call conglomerate. Authorship, which I offer as an alternative to the romance of the singular genius and and so on on one end, you know, there are many books that are sold to us a solo author that are actually just blatantly industrial productions. 00:24:21.000 --> 00:24:22.000 Hmm. 00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:23.000 It's like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were actually written by what's called the Stratum Ier Syndicate, but all packaged under a single fake name. 00:24:23.000 --> 00:24:26.000 Or the vastly popular mid-century mystery writer, Earl Stanley Gardner, who created Perry Mason, had a fiction factory on his California ranch. 00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:42.000 But I argue in the book that even major figures like Joan Diddy and or Cormac McCarthy or Tony Morrison are themselves part of this conglomerate authorship, this collective authorship. 00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:56.000 Now, the reason and this is this includes a bureaucratic assemblage. This conglomerate authorship is the effect or the the output of a bureaucratic assemblage of agents, editors, marketers, wholesalers, book buyers, and more. 00:24:56.000 --> 00:25:15.000 And these are all the individuals who populate the pages of the book. And so one of the things I'm doing is try to show how this disseminated, distributed collection of characters all like decisions that they're making under the particular constraints of systems. 00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:30.000 Is producing part of a feedback loop that works its way all the way back to the author and all the way out to the reader through any various numbers of mediated steps that affects the actual the very actual words that appear on the page. 00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000 That we read. 00:25:32.000 --> 00:25:49.000 Right. So you talk about it at sometimes as not just the, you know, author's name on the title page, but your, wanting to foreground the people who are hidden in the colophon, but you're wanting to foreground the people who are hidden in the colophon or, you know, the publisher's Yeah, exactly. 00:25:49.000 --> 00:26:10.000 And very small. But there's a lot of people in that. And yet, I mean, I want to sort of press you a little bit more on sort of the decisions you're making the way to tell the story because you you could foreground Publishers, you could tell this as a story of, you know, publishing houses. 00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:17.000 And the agents would really be the corporations and but that but that is not the way the story is told. 00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:29.000 These are people who are at one day in 1,990, you know, stood up and what is showed of your You're, your motivation for telling it in such a dramatic way. 00:26:29.000 --> 00:26:38.000 Yeah, there's there are several. It's you know tactical. In one is that I was aiming with this book for it to hopefully attract readers outside of the academy. 00:26:38.000 --> 00:26:52.000 1st was looking at people in New York publishing and hoping they would read it, but really I wrote it so that anyone who enjoys fiction might find the backstory interesting. 00:26:52.000 --> 00:27:04.000 And to make that story compelling and dramatic, I kept finding all these stories compelling dramatic people. And so at that, it that way, it's a way to kind of keep people turning. 00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:16.000 The pages, so that's 1. Another is that as I studied for this book, the more that I found, I found that literary history and, and what we understand of it is full of contingencies. 00:27:16.000 --> 00:27:30.000 It's not a deterministic story. Just because, you know, conglomeration appear it can appear in retrospect like this one gradually preceding deterministic monster going onward and growing. 00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:36.000 There's always, like the idiosyncrasies of individual people making decisions change that are in history. 00:27:36.000 --> 00:27:44.000 I mean, a great example of that is how WW Norton, there's a whole chapter dedicated to WW Norton, the last main chapter of the book. 00:27:44.000 --> 00:28:05.000 It's about independence. The way it has escaped conglomeration is just like the guy William W to Norton died young his wife sold the company to its employees it became employee owned and then it teamed up with a Cornell University professor. 00:28:05.000 --> 00:28:06.000 Hmm. 00:28:06.000 --> 00:28:14.000 Ted and I are both Cornell University alums, named MH Abrams who created the Norton anthology and that spawned his whole series of books that became incredibly profitable for WWE Norton. 00:28:14.000 --> 00:28:17.000 All of this meant that decades later, as an employee owned company with a strong college division that financed it extremely well. 00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:44.000 It could do things on the trade side starting in the 19 nineties that no one else could do. It could continue to reject and rebuff conglomerate people who wanted to buy it and then it had enough Success from the college side that it could do weird things so they hired an editor named Jerry Howard and Jerry Howard could get away with bringing in a guy who his books didn't look like anyone would be interested in 00:28:44.000 --> 00:28:55.000 them named Chuck Polanik and publish a book called Fight Club or they could publish Patrick O'brien who had been tried twice before in the United States and failed twice before in the United States. 00:28:55.000 --> 00:29:03.000 And in 1,990 they could try master and commander. You know, massive success, but it that wouldn't have happened in in the conglomerates. 00:29:03.000 --> 00:29:13.000 They wouldn't have tried it after 2 fails. But by going down to the level of the individual, you're able to see, make sense of in ways that you wouldn't if you had just narrated it from the top level abstraction. 00:29:13.000 --> 00:29:22.000 Right, right. There are interesting exceptions and counter currents and and. Yeah, and individual people who make a difference. 00:29:22.000 --> 00:29:52.000 It's a nice story. One of the. One of the interesting sort of echoes of this is the role of auto fiction in the story, which in some ways kind of is a Kind of a fictional version of the foregrounding of individuals that we've been talking about in the way you tell the story. 00:29:52.000 --> 00:30:05.000 But in it has complicated implications and it's hard to sort of figure out quite what. The relationship of auto fiction foregrounding the person of the writer, maybe as a character in the story. 00:30:05.000 --> 00:30:15.000 Implicitly or explicitly what what relation that has to conglomeration and I think there may be a couple different ways of telling that that. 00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:16.000 You explore and that may both be true but I'm kind of inviting you to explore them. 00:30:16.000 --> 00:30:32.000 But at one moment I think you quote, maybe Joe Moran is saying, you know, the new demands for publicity, you know, these publicity campaigns, author photos. 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:42.000 You know, auto fiction is in a way a reflection of that new conglomerate scale publicity industry that was making authors into kind of many celebrities. 00:30:42.000 --> 00:31:06.000 So kind of an echo of the of the corporate pressures on fiction. But there are other moments where you say like auto fiction is authors kind of trying to claw back some some agency from this massive system and you know foreground and older version of authorial power so Is it can it be both of those things? 00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:09.000 How do you see the story of auto fiction? 00:31:09.000 --> 00:31:13.000 Yeah, I mean it is what you know academics might sometimes call overd, which is just to say that there's a lot of reasons why it works. 00:31:13.000 --> 00:31:16.000 And they're coming from different directions. And some of them, yes, as you say, are in tension. 00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:27.000 So. 00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:36.000 There's that Shibboleth write what you know and writers are often always, you know, drawing consciously or unconsciously at some level from their life. 00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:44.000 And when and his writing has become increasingly professionalized in the last several decades. Increasingly reliant on marketing and publicity. 00:31:44.000 --> 00:32:04.000 Exactly as you say, this is this, fact that an author is becoming part of the promotion is becoming a brand unto themselves is becoming more and more involved with the bureaucratic publishing environment, it becomes something that gets folded into the writing. 00:32:04.000 --> 00:32:27.000 And an argument I make across the book is this isn't only the case in auto fiction that there's a kind of almost science fiction and this conglomerate authorship ways in which allegories of conglomeration make their way into books and auto fiction is kind of the most explicit. 00:32:27.000 --> 00:32:28.000 Hmm. 00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:43.000 Version of how that happens and in the explicitness that's part of author's taking some autonomy back, taking some control back, making themselves the agent, the protagonist, the one who is doing the actions, who is, you know, in, when, when Ben Learner writes in 10, 0 4, about his relationship with his agent and the deal they made to sell the book that we are 00:32:43.000 --> 00:32:50.000 reading. Okay. He's getting a chance to voice his own concerns. He's getting a chance to voice his own ambivalences. 00:32:50.000 --> 00:33:01.000 And in that way, he's taking control back. But for his publisher, for FSG, by making Ben Lerner by making Ben the central character of 1,000, and 4. 00:33:01.000 --> 00:33:16.000 It's also kind of putting him even more front and center as the brand, more front and center as a sort of marketing occasion and and and hiding further the bureaucratic publishing machine which is informing the elements of publishing. 00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:27.000 So on the one hand for the conglomerate, auto fiction allows them to kind of still foreground the author and the author gets to plough back some agency. 00:33:27.000 --> 00:33:28.000 So it's that. It's a win, it's a win win. 00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:41.000 Yeah. And sounds authors can sort of seize what's being done and use that for their own. 00:33:41.000 --> 00:33:42.000 Exactly. 00:33:42.000 --> 00:34:10.000 Their own personal brand. And and agency. What about, I want to talk a little bit about the role that other media have and are increasingly having other media ranging from television to sort of fan thick on the internet But I think one maybe a maybe a bridge to that would be to talk a little bit about this phenomenon of literary genre fiction, which is the boundaries blurring between what we think of as literary 00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:20.000 trade publishing. And the sort of high end of trade And, and then, you know, Noir, detective, science fiction. 00:34:20.000 --> 00:34:35.000 Coulson Whitehead you say I think at 1 point is sort of the king of literary genre but there are many many other examples and it might extend even down into things we don't think of as genre fiction but that might be that written by you know say Tony Morrison or or someone. 00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:55.000 What role this This is speculation on my part, but is. Could part of that story be television eating into the mass market side and sort of genre fiction being pushed toward literature as much as literature wanting to the literary authors reaching out to use the genre. 00:34:55.000 --> 00:35:04.000 Tropes. What story would you tell about it? 00:35:04.000 --> 00:35:05.000 Hmm. 00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:26.000 Yeah, no, I think there's no question and actually there's a there's a great book that just came out in the last few weeks by a great scholar of publishing name Evan Breyer called novel competition and he really tells that story about what the emergence of television and and other forms of mass culture did to fiction and novels and how novelists responded and undoubted the the competition from television 00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:56.000 shaped some of the drive to make literary fiction. More popularly accessible through the use. One thing that I found, sort of late in the writing of this, book was that the terms genre fiction and literary fiction didn't actually even have circulation. 00:36:01.000 --> 00:36:02.000 Hmm. 00:36:02.000 --> 00:36:15.000 Jonathan, I mean, this is Andrew Goldstone published a great article on this very recently about how genre fiction is a term only emerged in the 19 seventys and literary fiction post states that literary fiction only emerges in the 19 eighties And the argument that I make is that literary fiction emerged in that specific moment as a, it's a, it's a, it's a. 00:36:15.000 --> 00:36:16.000 Hmm. 00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:24.000 it's another genre and it's a form of commercialization. It's a way on the market to distinguish literary fiction from genre fiction only after genre fiction came. 00:36:24.000 --> 00:36:32.000 And we had specific genres, we had mystery, we had Western, we had romance, but to think of them all as a specific kind of thing together that we call genre. 00:36:32.000 --> 00:36:39.000 In the fiftys and sixtys, mass market publishers were publishing all of these together. There weren't these functions. 00:36:39.000 --> 00:36:40.000 Hmm. 00:36:40.000 --> 00:37:01.000 These distinctions are part of the process that I described. That moment of the mid seventys, late seventys, when conglomeration intensified in a world of state inflation and publishers were starting to think about how can we make novels more effective and replicable mass-culture items and that's when genre fiction became this reified category. 00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:13.000 It was really hard to publish literary fiction then in the late seventys and early eighties until this this enterprising editor in Gary Fiscuit John at random house started vintage contemporaries. 00:37:13.000 --> 00:37:19.000 Which had these and big part of that series and 1984 when they launched was these covers. 00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:27.000 The cover of big fiction is an homage to the covers of vintage contemporaries. And they published Jane Mchenry who was a friend Gary Fiscuit Johns from college. 00:37:27.000 --> 00:37:37.000 Bright lights big city. Massive hit. They published it as a paperback first.st For a lot of reasons that I could go into, but that was not done at the time. 00:37:37.000 --> 00:37:57.000 And by doing that, they resuscitated this thing that was now called fiction. And very quickly this thing called literary fiction needed to figure out other ways in order to be profitable at conglomerate houses and one of the 1st geniuses to figure out how to do that was Cormac McCarthy who changed his whole strategy. 00:37:57.000 --> 00:38:10.000 Of publishing with all the pretty horses in 1992, which is like a Louie Lamour Western in in a in a Cormac McCarthy voice, which is unlike anything he had done before. 00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:14.000 There's a whole story to tell there And that for now. 00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:19.000 Thanks. Thanks. That's fascinating and thanks for the. 00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:25.000 Lead to novel competition. Among other things. So. 00:38:25.000 --> 00:38:27.000 What's let's move a little bit toward the the present and and sort of what's happening and what might happen. 00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:46.000 What one of the interesting things in your conclusion is you acknowledge a lot of contemporary trends that people have framed as sort of challenging the dominant. 00:38:46.000 --> 00:38:56.000 Publishing model and I mean you know fanfic self-publishing and the Amazon sort of alliance with the self-publishing ecosystem. 00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:08.000 Social media and we could also gesture it you know the older sorts of competition like from television and film but also especially audio books audio books have been booming you acknowledge all of that. 00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:16.000 But at the same time, you end up saying it's still the conglomerate era. And, the way you put it, I think, is interesting. 00:39:16.000 --> 00:39:37.000 It's, it's that It's not that these things aren't happening necessarily, but that the conglomerate publishers don't really care from their perspective these These forces are not. 00:39:37.000 --> 00:39:51.000 Am I presenting that right and do you think that's still true? Do you think that will? Continue to be true even if we add in, you know, New, new like interactive forms of bandwidth mediated by artificial intelligence. 00:39:51.000 --> 00:39:58.000 Well, will that still be sort of not something that conglomerates need to care about? 00:39:58.000 --> 00:40:05.000 So I would say there's some yes and some no there. I would say in terms of thinking about the born digital writing. 00:40:05.000 --> 00:40:17.000 Stuff at Wapad, AO 3, KDP. Largely the conglomerate mainstream traditional publishing largely doesn't care except when you have a Colleen Hoover or an EL James or an Andy Weirs, something kind of popped through in there, they're like, we can pull them into our sphere and make a bunch of money on that. 00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:35.000 And so, you know, people are paying attention. I suspect they're increasingly paying attention. To what's happening those fears in order just to do to pluck, you know. 00:40:35.000 --> 00:40:55.000 And in terms of audio books though, a way that published conglomerate publishers have made a great deal of money in the 21st century is by so subsidiary rights is a major form of how publishers earn money which is rights beyond the original publication of the book in print. 00:40:55.000 --> 00:41:02.000 And audio books has been a huge source of profits for the last 15 years and continues to grow at a rapid pace. 00:41:02.000 --> 00:41:09.000 And this has been a huge boon for publishers and has helped keep them in the black. So they've really leaned into kind of audio rights. 00:41:09.000 --> 00:41:25.000 And they've also leaned into foreign rights, in trying to expand their the market for Us-based books in say China or India or places around the world, that's another place where they've been looking for profits. 00:41:25.000 --> 00:41:38.000 But yeah, the sort of born digital stuff, like one of the things that's gonna be really interesting to watch in the coming years is whether or not these 2 clergy largely parallel universes figure out ways to merge. 00:41:38.000 --> 00:41:53.000 Something like Wpad is already trying to, kind of come in as a competitor. You know, you've got an interesting situation in terms of this question of conglomerate authorship that I talk about where you know I'm saying cognition happens in the mainstream publishing books through all these forces. 00:41:53.000 --> 00:42:01.000 But if you actually look at something like Wopat or Archive of her own, it becomes suddenly much more literal. 00:42:01.000 --> 00:42:26.000 Site. You've got these people creating these genres. You know as a kind of comments like no one's claiming the sort of copyright of authorship on it and then you get these scandals when people do try to take something from a TARK of of our own and bring it over and claim it under their own copyright and you get there's incredible piece on kind of wolf erotica genre, the Omega 00:42:26.000 --> 00:42:37.000 verse, differently from Alexandra Alter in the New York Times about one of the scandals when this happens when something that was truly the creation a genre a whole set of tropes a whole set of conventions created in the commons. 00:42:37.000 --> 00:42:47.000 And Wapad is like, you know, created with constant feedback from readership, but then you've got this situation where those kind of become privatized. 00:42:47.000 --> 00:42:55.000 And this is a question, like a way that like thinking about how authorship is changing in the platform age. 00:42:55.000 --> 00:43:01.000 Is, you know, something that I think is really fascinating. 00:43:01.000 --> 00:43:11.000 Thanks. That's, yeah, that's an, a fascinating story. Can I ask you to comment on Sort of related to this, the effect of other media. 00:43:11.000 --> 00:43:31.000 Do you think how conscious are authors of There's this thesis out there, option aesthetics, JD Porter, Laura Mcgrath, and, and Xander Manchell sort of argue that authors are now kind of writing for Don't producers, because ultimately they can make a lot of money if their book is optioned. 00:43:31.000 --> 00:43:35.000 And so that shapes the way novels are written now. How, how important is that in this picture? 00:43:35.000 --> 00:43:45.000 That and are the conglomerates aware of that? Does that, a problem for them? Is it a plus for them? 00:43:45.000 --> 00:43:47.000 Yeah, so this fits into this. Idea that sociologists talk about has anticipatory socialization. 00:43:47.000 --> 00:44:07.000 So authors, my theory of the author is that they unconsciously or consciously have the sense of all of these forces that are gonna help make them a success and that gets built into the way they design their books. 00:44:07.000 --> 00:44:16.000 And one of the, as you say, like one of the kind of the biggest lotteries you can enter into as an author is for getting option for film and TV. 00:44:16.000 --> 00:44:22.000 Now that's a whole other like it gets really complicated. So many books are optioned and then never pays off. 00:44:22.000 --> 00:44:26.000 But you know the author maybe already collected their check. And yeah, I mean, I think Mcgrath and Porter and Manchester do a lovely, I think that piece was in the Atlantic. 00:44:26.000 --> 00:44:38.000 Anyway, that piece does a good job of trying to suggest some of the ways that that is shaping how people are designing books. 00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:47.000 Like if you're designing a book to be taken up by TV, there needs to be a possibility. 00:44:47.000 --> 00:44:52.000 Built into the form of the writing itself. How are you gonna do that? What's important? 00:44:52.000 --> 00:45:11.000 How can you have a cast of characters that could double over into TV, specifically. And so Yes, I mean, I don't know how widespread and it's in there's also a difference between the people who are aiming, you know, this we still live in a world of a broad distinction between popularity and prestige. 00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:33.000 And there's all the folks who are really gunning for the big money who are going to be trying to work with an literary agent and go to a conglomerate, but there's also like a thriving sphere of small nonprofits like New York Review books or transit, Deep Velum, Grey Wolf Coffee House. 00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:45.000 On and on and on and on and on and here folks are you know avoiding perhaps some of there is more profit driven motives that affect the form of their work. 00:45:45.000 --> 00:46:08.000 Fascinating. Although I guess was did a ratio originally grey wolf and then that did just get made into a movie but maybe it's not as As. 00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:09.000 Yeah. 00:46:09.000 --> 00:46:14.000 That's a complicated story too. I mean that's a fascinating story. I mean that required You know, Percival Everett's a writer who's huge, I mean, as one of the biggest books of the year in 2,024, James, his rewriting of Huckleberry Finn, published with Double Day for at minimum $500,000 advance maybe a lot more than 00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:20.000 that. But here is a guy who's been writing in the trenches for 3 and a half decades. 00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:35.000 His 1st books were published in the eightys with with more big commercial presses, but they failed. And he would have been done, but he went to Ray Wolf, which was then a quite small in the, in the early mid ninetys, a small nonprofit. 00:46:35.000 --> 00:46:40.000 And he teamed up with Fiona McCrae, who was a new editor there, and she became his champion. 00:46:40.000 --> 00:46:51.000 So she published book after book of his at the small press didn't sell a lot of copies. Erasure actually weirdly was published a 1 outlier published by University of New England press during those years. 00:46:51.000 --> 00:47:13.000 Then was later reissued by Gray Wolf. But he, you know, he was not writing books that would be celebrated or published or would work with conglomerate presses for decades and only in the last few years after building a follow-up building critical like celebration was he able to write the book the trees that made him a finalist for the booker Beoner Mcrae finally 00:47:13.000 --> 00:47:25.000 retires. He can take all of this cultural capital he built over decades and kind of put it into this advance and double day, which is his 1st one not for Grey Wolf in 3 decades, other than Raiser. 00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:30.000 So anyway, and then Cord Jefferson picking up Erases its own idiosyncratic story. 00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:32.000 So the contingencies, the contingencies. 00:47:32.000 --> 00:47:52.000 Yeah, great. Yeah, again, individuals. Have their own stories. Well, we may have, questions from the audience that are beginning to pile up in the chat and I want to give Dave a chance to Awesome. 00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:58.000 Thanks. Yes, we do. Indeed have some questions, coming up in the chat. 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:05.000 In fact, some, throughout the talk. And some of them you kind of got to already. 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:12.000 So I'll skip past those. So I promised you an AI question. I told you we always get an AI question and you got a little bit into it. 00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:15.000 But there was one about the idea of a Penguin Random House GPT or something like that, right? 00:48:15.000 --> 00:48:25.000 Is interesting. And so the question is do you think conglomerates are really against AI? 00:48:25.000 --> 00:48:33.000 We've seen a lot of public kind of posturing, particularly around copyright. Or is it just AI that they can't control? 00:48:33.000 --> 00:48:42.000 Oh, it's just a act that they can't control. Absolutely, you know, I mean the new so Penguin Random House which is the world's largest trade . 00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:43.000 Okay they had to pay 200 million dollars to summon and sister when they failed their after their failed bid. 00:48:43.000 --> 00:48:58.000 And so they had to cut their global CEO and their US CEO both got fired. The new CEO at Penguin Random House revealed in an interview that he's like all in for AI insofar as it can help rationalize, make more efficient the work that they do at the house. 00:48:58.000 --> 00:49:28.000 So. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think these big 5 conglomerates their CEOs their job is Find whatever mechanisms you can when you're in a business of books of culture that is not In and of itself designed to constantly grow every quarter, then you've got to get creative and always think about where am I gonna find that little edge and AI is right now the place that everyone in C suites 00:49:33.000 --> 00:49:41.000 across America are looking to find that edge. And heads of the big 5 are no different. 00:49:41.000 --> 00:49:54.000 So another one that hadn't occurred to me at all reading the book, but I think is really interesting is, whether you have an opinion on the relative disinterest, I guess, particularly among the large conglomerates in short fiction. 00:49:54.000 --> 00:50:05.000 Given in you know in other areas of entertainment media short formats are amongst the most popular and I think becoming even more popular now. 00:50:05.000 --> 00:50:12.000 Yeah, that's a really interesting question. They're like on the one hand, short stories have a terrible reputation. 00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:24.000 Books of short stories, like there's, you know, I would look at memos and stuff from, you know, back in the ninetys bring like, you know, whatever it is, even if it's short stories just like slap the name novel on the top of it so that it will actually sell. 00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:39.000 And that's often the case people, agents are often trying to work with writers to take how can they take their MFA short story collections to take, how can they take their MFA short story collections and kind of. 00:50:39.000 --> 00:51:03.000 Mould it into something that looks like a novel for commercial reasons. But the other piece of that is that nobellas are having something like a Arenissance and both in big trade publishing but it also you can see kind of everywhere also in academic publishing there's there's this sort of fondness for fast short books books that are you know run 70 80 pages maybe to 110 pages. 00:51:03.000 --> 00:51:23.000 Absolutely because of what anacorn Blue another critic calls in a recent book this desire for a mediacy the sense that the kind of a push she really worries that there's this there's this push towards simplification reduction immediate gratification and that this is part of the motive behind this desire. 00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:38.000 For books in that kind of 70 to 110 page novella range, that for that reason might be seeing something like, like a moment. 00:51:38.000 --> 00:51:55.000 That's really interesting. But, so another question we got, and I'm thinking about sort of the attention span issue that's kind of lurking, I think, around a lot of this with online platforms and just how we consume medium more generally. 00:51:55.000 --> 00:52:15.000 There's a question about what kind of going beyond the book I guess the effect of the rise of digital platforms as kind of the dominant means of distribution and kind of along with that some of these other sort of leverage buy out companies that have dominated space like overdrive. 00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:20.000 And, what is our effect on what's being written? 00:52:20.000 --> 00:52:39.000 Yeah, that is a really good question. There was a good piece a few years ago by Nick Levy, I think in journal post 45, thinking about how, you know, if you're able to write on a platform, suddenly it makes the idea of seriality make a lot more sense. 00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:59.000 You're so in some ways what we're seeing is a return to the kind of 19th century, a return to the kind of 19th century, like the triple decker, 19th century Victorian novel, 19th century Victorian novel, there was the compilation of Charles Dickens writing monthly, there was the compilation of Charles Dickens writing monthly, like segments over and over and over again. 00:52:59.000 --> 00:53:17.000 If you're writing for something like Wattpad or if you're writing on KDP, it can make a lot more business sense or just aesthetic sense, formal sense, to write in installations rather to them to just like envision one, like, you know, kind of enclosed volume where the story begins and ends. 00:53:17.000 --> 00:53:33.000 So that's what I see as maybe the most obvious like aesthetic formal shift that is like occurs when you kind of break the technology of the book onto the digital platform. 00:53:33.000 --> 00:53:34.000 Awesome. 00:53:34.000 --> 00:53:41.000 And Ted, jump in if you've got, you know, your own thoughts about any of this. 00:53:41.000 --> 00:53:42.000 Yeah. 00:53:42.000 --> 00:53:43.000 Nope, I'm let you take it. 00:53:43.000 --> 00:53:55.000 Okay. So I think I mentioned last time we talked. One of my favorite parts of the book was this, extensive glossary of publishing figures that you include. 00:53:55.000 --> 00:54:00.000 And so this is sort of a fun question, but you have a lot of. Kind of crazy characters. 00:54:00.000 --> 00:54:07.000 That are highlighted throughout the book. Who is the most interesting to you? 00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:17.000 Oh man, it's such a hard question. But I was really delighted to find this guy named Jim Sitter. 00:54:17.000 --> 00:54:23.000 So he's someone who he's not a name. People know. And I found it in a really weird way. 00:54:23.000 --> 00:54:37.000 I was doing an event at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor there put me in touch with one of their students who was doing an undergrad thesis on gentrification and nonprofit publishers in Minneapolis and she had been talking to this guy. 00:54:37.000 --> 00:54:41.000 She's like, you should talk to this guy. Here's an email, name's Jim Sitter. 00:54:41.000 --> 00:54:48.000 I got in touch with this guys is he's in Minnesota. He was the architect of nonprofit publishing. 00:54:48.000 --> 00:54:55.000 In the United States. Like he was the one he pulled Gray Wolf Press to the Twin Cities from Washington State. 00:54:55.000 --> 00:55:00.000 He pulled Coffee House Press, which had been called toothpaste up from Iowa City. 00:55:00.000 --> 00:55:09.000 And he was their sort of consultant who worked with them and milkweed editions. To figure out what it would look like to become office. 00:55:09.000 --> 00:55:16.000 He was strategizing at dinners with Tony Morrison and the head of the Walker Art Center. Then when they were both on the National Endowment for Arts. 00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:36.000 Kind of council. And this guy eventually went to New York City and like got these massive grants to allow it to become a national nationwide movement and now the guys like you know he's he's he's not working in that business anymore he's still hanging out in Minneapolis and he's sitting he's got an incredible mind and he's a talker and he's just like 00:55:36.000 --> 00:55:57.000 got all these stories and so I got in touch with him and just did interview after interview where he would tell me in incredible detail these stories about running into Alan Korn, Bloom, the founder of Coffee House Press and how they 1st met and what that in exchange was like and what was like in his, you know, garage working on a Platon Press doing letter press, in the middle of the 00:55:57.000 --> 00:56:06.000 night listening to baseball. So, you know, I just got endless stories out of Jim's sitter and after the book was done and it was about to get published I went up to Minnesota to Meet him in person and he took to me to this like old school. 00:56:06.000 --> 00:56:29.000 The Monte Carlo in the warehouse district in Minnesota. Everyone knew him there. And we got this little room and he brought this kind of lost and found that kind of show and tell of all these documents he'd had from over the years and spread them out over a couple tables while we're having martinis and 2 in the afternoon. 00:56:29.000 --> 00:56:30.000 It was incredible. 00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:48.000 That does sound like a fun one. Well, I guess my, comment on that as I was reading the book was thinking like, how much do we lose from having such levels of consolidation where like the individual personality role is in some ways, to diminish compared to. 00:56:48.000 --> 00:56:50.000 Publishing as it was. 00:56:50.000 --> 00:57:02.000 I mean, I read a just like someone's sub-sack post. Couple days ago saying, you know, a report from someone in the industry who said, you know, when I was acquiring one debut book, it needed to be read at a conglomerate house. 00:57:02.000 --> 00:57:15.000 It needed to be read by 16. People before we could acquire it. And if you need 16 people to look at a book and agree to acquire it, you know, you're gonna reduce the risk to a sort of institutional common sense. 00:57:15.000 --> 00:57:36.000 And it might be in exactly like an extreme case, but nevertheless, you know, the kind of aesthetic risk you can take at a conglomerate publishing house is reduced by any number of sort of built-in mechanisms to kind of increase predictability and profit and decrease risk. 00:57:36.000 --> 00:57:41.000 Yeah, no, I mean, it makes sense. They're trying to operate a big business. So. 00:57:41.000 --> 00:57:50.000 So, Chris is turn his video on, which means that we need to stop talking because he's gonna wrap us up here in a minute. 00:57:50.000 --> 00:57:56.000 But thank you both. This was such an incredible talk. I really appreciate you doing this. I appreciate everyone. 00:57:56.000 --> 00:58:00.000 Joining the talk so Chris over to you 00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:01.000 Thanks, Dave. Yeah, listen, here's the good news. We could go for another hour. 00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:20.000 With the crowd that we've held here and, and would love to do so but in the, in the fairness to everyone and of course, Dan and Ted in fairness to you and your time we will bring this particular conversation to a close and you know maybe we'll come back together for part 2 or another conversation because I think there's a lot more that we can explore in this book. 00:58:20.000 --> 00:58:39.000 We've really just scratched the surface of the that deep dive that Dave mentioned, Dan, that you took in your research again, so I thank you, to you, Dan, for, for the book and to Ted for facilitating the conversation. 00:58:39.000 --> 00:58:46.000 If you haven't picked up your of big fiction. Please grab it today. Duncan share to link out. 00:58:46.000 --> 00:59:04.000 In the chat, we'd love to have, love to see you pick up the book either, you know, from the, from the book, from the book Smith, our local San Francisco bookseller, or of course your own preferred local bookstore. 00:59:04.000 --> 00:59:15.000 Sorry, muted there. As, as we, wind down here today, the, I wanna tell you about a couple of events that, that I think you're gonna want to attend. 00:59:15.000 --> 00:59:23.000 So on May, 17.th Dave and his colleagues will be hosting an in-person celebration at the Internet Archive for the 10th anniversary of Authors Alliance. 00:59:23.000 --> 00:59:30.000 And as Dave mentioned at the top, it's a really important organization. Please check into it. Sign up, become a member if you aren't already. 00:59:30.000 --> 00:59:37.000 And if you're in the base area on the 17.th Please do come, for our team your, celebration of authors alliance. 00:59:37.000 --> 00:59:48.000 Our, the program features a keynote from sci-fi author and journalist Cory Doctorow who is a particular favorite of mine and was also mentioned earlier on in the conversation. 00:59:48.000 --> 00:59:49.000 Our next event then, is, is an interesting one. It's not hosted by the Internet Archive, but I think it will be of interest to this audience. 00:59:49.000 --> 01:00:03.000 I wanted to share it here. This is Communia is an international association incorporated under Belgian law. 01:00:03.000 --> 01:00:11.000 That advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse a reuse of culture and knowledge. 01:00:11.000 --> 01:00:17.000 And they're hosting a conversation the right to E Lind and having a conversation across the EU and across their consortium of what does it mean? 01:00:17.000 --> 01:00:26.000 To lend books digitally. So, you know, libraries have long played a crucial role in ensuring broad public access to knowledge into culture, yet libraries can't lend out digital books today under the same conditions as physical books. 01:00:26.000 --> 01:00:40.000 So this conversation is meant to bring together and ask the questions of what are the specific legal barriers that are stifling libraries in the digital environment and how do we overcome them. 01:00:40.000 --> 01:00:49.000 That is on when Wednesday, May, the 29.th It's at 1,500 CET or 9 a. M. 01:00:49.000 --> 01:00:53.000 Eastern time, which I know maybe early for, some of our West Coast audience, but there is a recording available, so please register for that if you're interested in participating. 01:00:53.000 --> 01:01:03.000 And then you can, listen in if you're not able to join synchronously. 01:01:03.000 --> 01:01:08.000 So to close down here, I'd like to wrap as we always do with commitments and thank yous. 01:01:08.000 --> 01:01:09.000 As we said a couple of times, but it bears repeating today's session was recorded and the links will be shared. 01:01:09.000 --> 01:01:19.000 And archived on archive.org tonight and shared with you and all registrants in an email tomorrow. 01:01:19.000 --> 01:01:36.000 And for thank yous, again, a thank you to Dan and Ted for such a great conversation today to Dave Hansen and Authors Alliance for co-hosting the session and to you, our audience for for your time and your enthusiasm and the great questions that we had today. 01:01:36.000 --> 01:01:42.000 We've shared out final links in chat if you want to rewatch any of our book talks or if you missed some. 01:01:42.000 --> 01:01:43.000 Over the past 3 almost 4 years now that we've been doing this series they're all preserved and available for viewing on archive. 01:01:43.000 --> 01:01:53.000 Org and we also have another event that unfortunately we weren't able to schedule and get into our our list here, but there is another really good book talk coming up. 01:01:53.000 --> 01:02:12.000 Looking at June, the 6th as the date. So the best way to stay up to date on what's happening at the Internet Archive is by our blog or our calendar of events which has been, which Dunkin is shared out into the chat. 01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:13.000 And always on our, social media. We're active on every platform at varying levels of, frequency. 01:02:13.000 --> 01:02:27.000 So, to sign off here, a big thank you again to everyone. And I hope that you can join us at one of our upcoming events. 01:02:27.000 --> 01:02:40.000 Thank you all. Everyone. Have a great day.